Thornton Wilder Quotes

There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.

The comic spirit is given to us in order that we may analyze, weigh, and clarify things in us which nettle us, or which we are outgrowing, or trying to reshape.

The most exhausting of all our adventures is that journey down the long corridors of the mind to the last halls where belief is enthroned.

Love is an energy which exists of itself. It is its own value.

Love is its own eternity.

We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures.

Cesar is not a philosophical man. His life has been one long flight from reflection. At least he is clever enough not to expose the poverty of his general ideas; he never permits the conversation to move toward philosophical principles. Men of his type so dread all deliberation that they glory in the practice of the instantaneous decision. They think they are saving themselves from irresolution; in reality they are sparing themselves the contemplation of all the consequences of their acts. Moreover, in this way they can rejoice in the illusion of never having made a mistake; for act follows so swiftly on act that it is impossible to reconstruct the past and say that an alternative decision would have been better. They can pretend that every act was forced on them under emergency and that every decision was mothered by necessity

you have to love life to have life, and you need to have life to love life

"It is difficult, my dear Lucius, to escape becoming the person others believe one to be. A slave is twice enslaved, once by his chains and once again by the glances that fall upon him and say "thou slave.

That’s what it was like to be alive. To move about in a cloud of ignorance; to go up and down trampling on the feelings of those...of those about you. To spend and waste time as though you had a million years. To be always at the mercy of one self-centered passion, or another. Now you know- that’s the happy existence you wanted to go back to. Ignorance and blindness.

-Simon Stimson, OUR TOWN

Do human beings ever realize life while they live it ?-every, every minute?

Choose the least important day in your life. It will be important enough.

Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.

There are the stars — doing their old, old crisscross journeys in the sky. Scholars haven't settled the matter yet, but they seem to think there are no living beings out there. Just chalk... or fire. Only this one is straining away, straining away all the time to make something of itself. Strain's so bad that every sixteen hours everybody lies down and gets a rest.

Does anybody realize what life is
while they're living it- every, every minute?